


no place for cowards (or: jim kirk's heart is a tender place)

by alienbabe (molotovgirl)



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Implied Spock/Kirk - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Self-Hatred, the Meaning of Love ((according to jim kirk))
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 21:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5601910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/molotovgirl/pseuds/alienbabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a girl tells him once "you don't know how to love anyone, Jim Kirk," and he starts to think that maybe she's right</p>
            </blockquote>





	no place for cowards (or: jim kirk's heart is a tender place)

**Author's Note:**

> this is the sad result of me utilizing some legal medicinal marijuana and pouring my 2 am emotions onto a google doc

 

 

 

I.  

Fourteen and kicked out of the house for the third time this week, Jim Kirk tilts his head back and looks at the sky. He swears that if he keeps his eyes up long enough, he can feel his feet start to leave the ground like his body is drawing him into orbit. His mom's been off-planet for coming up on three years in a row now, and when she comes home she brings Jim little presents from distant solar systems––jumping pebbles from the Gargonian deserts and a jar of living slime from Darograb's famous swamplands and a toy phaser that he's way too old for but uses anyway, running around the backyard in the Midwestern dusk, shooting invisible aliens. But she hasn't been home for months now, and it's just Frank and Jim and Sam, the three of them trapped in awkward orbit like planets around a dying sun. Frank comes home drunk more and more often, watching old football games on the holoscreen and threatening to break bottles over Jim and Sam's heads if they keep mouthing off. 

"I'm getting out of here," Sam says at least twice a week. "I swear to God, the next time that fucker comes home drunk I'm gonna pop him in the jaw and take off for California." 

Sam talks about California a lot, about blue skies and endless beaches and hot girls. The only thing Jim knows about California is that Starfleet Academy is there––but already even saying those words puts a sour taste in his mouth. He's already decided that he hates Starfleet, hates their stupid uniforms and their stupid badges and the fact that they killed his dad and keep sending his mom off to other galaxies. 

But now, standing in the front yard with his neck craned to look up at the sky, Jim thinks that maybe space is pretty cool after all. There's no Frank in space, and no school and no bullies and no homework. He thinks that  _that's_ probably something he could used to. 

 

II.

His high school aptitude tests classify him as an  _actual literal genius_ but Jim Kirk is more concerned with getting drunk out by the old quarry and pissing off every authority figure within a hundred mile radius. Sam lit off for California the night before Jim started ninth grade, and he promised that he'd call or write or both but two years have passed and Jim's stopped counting the days since he left. He adds Sam to the growing list of people who leave a bad taste in his mouth. Frank's getting worse––Jim walks in on him balls deep in another woman, some chick from the bar downtown, and earns himself a black eye that lasts for a week and three broken ribs. He's all but dropped out of school, spends his days getting drunk and trying to pick up girls, sometimes breaking into government buildings or hacking bank systems just for the hell of it. He gets picked up by the police blackout drunk out by the quarry, the same one he almost drove Frank's convertible into several years back. Once he's slept it off in the county jail cell, the station intake officer asks if there's anyone he'd like to call for bail money, maybe a parent or a sibling. Jim just laughs. 

"No," he says, and pretends that his heart isn't cleaving itself in two inside his ribcage. "There's no one." 

 

III. 

Jim's glad he looks older than seventeen; bartenders don't question him and girls––women––don't question him and bouncers don't question him unless he starts a fight or finishes one. He does plenty of both, and when he's not going down swinging he's picking up girls (or trying to, at least). He thinks, ironically, that Frank would probably be pretty proud of him, in a kind of fucked-up way. He sleeps his way through pretty much the entire female population of Riverside and then moves onto the transient group of Starfleet cadets waiting to ship out of the space port on the outskirts of town. He finds that he prefers this, a drunken blur of anonymous pretty faces and anonymous bodies and then waking up before dark the next morning to dress hastily and leave before they wake up. It's easy and painless and affords him meager bragging rights with the bar regulars, even if none of the female patrons will look him in the eye anymore. He doesn't even think of it as sex––that's too biological, something primal and animalistic. This, what he does, it's a failed calculation, a drunk hand tipping whiskey into an overflowing shot glass. It's self-medication. Sometimes, he thinks, it's the only thing that feels real. 

 

IV. 

A girl tells him once _you don't know how to love anyone, Jim Kirk_ and he starts to think that maybe she's right, that maybe he has faulty machinery beating beneath his ribs. He's a time bomb, he knows. He's driven to the edge of the quarry more than once and stood there wondering if he should have taken that leap years ago. It wouldn't hurt, he reasons. Just the fall and then nothing. It's the falling he's afraid of, though. He's not scared of heights, just the sensation of nothingness beneath his feet. And the knowledge that eventually every fall ends.  _You don't know hot to love anyone._ Not even himself. _Especially_ not himself. He thinks that he was born on the run from an exploding star, and eventually the blastwave is going to hit him. He thinks of the portrait over the mantlepiece when he was a kid, the one of his dad, before Frank started coming around and his mom took the photo down and put it in storage. They have the same eyes, Jim knows. The same jawline, the same perpetually defiant facial expression. His dad turned around, he thinks. He turned into the heart of the explosion. Maybe, Jim thinks, he should too. 

 

V. 

He thinks that how he feels about the Enterprise––how he feels about the ship, the crew,  _space_ ––is what love must feel like. Sitting in the captain's chair, nothing but the white-freckled fields of space ahead, he forgets everything that any Iowa girl said to him. He knows how to love. The balance between life and death, the value of courage and kindness. Jim Kirk knows selflessness, he knows sacrifice. Love is a bloody offering upon an alter. It demands the act of baring. Most nights Jim can't sleep because the past haunts him like nails under his feet and he can't breathe for the weight of it all. But some nights he can unfold himself into gentle hands, he can let go. He thinks of love and he sees two palms pressed against a glass door, he sees the red flash of nuclear hazard lights. He sees brown eyes turned bright like planets, dizzy with the intoxication of human emotions. He thinks of love and he knows, finally, that he is worthy. 


End file.
